The isekai genre is definitely one of the most popular kinds of anime out there, and there are a million tropes that go along with it. While most isekai worlds are fantasy worlds, some involve things like getting trapped in video games or traveling through time.
Regardless of what kind of isekai anime people are into, it’s probably pretty well represented in Isekai Quarter, the joke show about characters from four different isekai worlds being transported into one place to deal with an adventure together. Isekai fans will be in stitches over these 10 hilarious jokes and gags from the series.
10 They End Up In A Regular World
The first episode of Isekai Quarter finds the main characters of our shows stuck in another world, one that’s really different from the ones they left behind. The big joke here is that all of these characters have been transported from a regular world into the worlds of their respective series, and Isekai Quartet has sent them in the other direction: back into the regular, modern world.
While the protagonists of each of the series are used to this world, they also bring with them all of their allies who don’t belong there, creating an entirely different fish out of water story where they all have to deal with each other on top of the new situation.
9 Subaru And Kazuma
One of the gags of the series is that two of the protagonists, Subaru from Re:Zero and Kazuma from KonoSuba are a lot alike. In fact, they’re pretty similar in character design and even wear similar outfits when they make their way to their respective isekai worlds. They also are both shut-ins who don’t have a lot of friends and spend most of their time at home by themselves.
Once they’ve been transported to their new worlds, they’re both even surrounded by pastel-colored magical girls. Isekai Quartet makes sure to point these similarities out whenever possible since one of the big tropes of these kinds of anime are that outcasts who have to branch out outside of their comfort zones in order to survive in their new worlds.
8 Serious Balance Issues
Ains from Overlord is confronted by Aqua from KonoSuba, who feels it’s her duty as a goddess to rid the world of someone undead like him. This leads to a pretty funny encounter in which she, a cute girl with magical powers, casts a spell on him that ultimately doesn’t work but which causes him a lot of pain.
Kazuma punches her in the head and drags her off, apologizing to Ains for the trouble. It’s a great show of how silly these different worlds all fit together since the power rankings seem way off.
7 Learning The Rules Of The World
In every isekai anime, there are rules that have to be met in order for the main character to be able to return to their own world. This usually involves beating some big bad or going on a quest to retrieve something.
Every isekai character should probably understand this, so the fact that Demiurge is the only one who figures it out, and Ains pretends to know what he’s talking about in order to get him to explain how this works in their new setting, is a pretty good joke. There’s always a moment when a character explains the rules of the world.
6 Ains Asking Tanya If She’s From Japan
This is a deeply hilarious joke, considering that all of the characters are from Japan because it’s an anime. They’re even all speaking Japanese, which makes everything about it an even more meta gag than it already was.
The idea that these characters didn’t all realize already that each of them had ended up trapped in a world they weren’t from, sometimes in bodies that weren’t their original bodies, is pretty funny. And the difference between Ains’s situation and Tanya’s, though they’re essentially the same conceptually, that she’s a little girl who was once a salaryman in Japan and he’s an undead overlord who was once just a gamer, makes it even funnier.
5 Subaru And Kazuma Arguing About Their Situations
We’ve already mentioned that Subaru and Kazuma are pretty similar characters, and after they figure out that they’ve ended up in pretty much the same situation, they compare notes about their lives in their respective isekai worlds. It’s a great scene because they discuss the tropes involved with turning up in a new world: suddenly having magical power, having someone who keeps telling you these quests you need to go on, needing to figure out how to survive.
But Subaru is definitely in a better position, living in a mansion with a bunch of girls, and Kazuma is pretty mad about it, probably for good reason.
4 Ains Making It Snow
This is such a weird, super funny moment in the show that it makes us laugh out loud to think about it. During the talent show, Ains wants to show off his own incredible power after seeing a bout of explosion magic.
After a super impressive, very dramatic use of magic circles that make us think he’s going to do something really destructive, he ends up just making it snow. The funniest part is the way that it suddenly turns into a much different anime, with the characters all experiencing the snow in different ways as a soft J-pop song plays over the credits. It’s so silly for this kind of show and plays on the tropes of insert songs in so many anime.
3 All Of The Harems
With the exception of The Saga of Tanya the Evil, all of the series represented here are about male characters who end up in fantasy type settings surrounded by female characters, at least one of which is probably meant to be a love interest. This is a pretty classic trope for these kinds of series.
So when the male soldiers serving under Tanya start to regret that they don’t get to be surrounded by women all the time, when even the big skeleton man is, we can’t help but snicker at having this pointed out.
2 No Joke-Filled Slice-Of-Life Worlds
When the students are all put on different committees together, Tanya, Kazuma, and Demiurge all end up together on the disciplinary committee. Tanya, of course, can’t stand the idea of not being in charge and not having a lot of order.
When she yells, “There will be no joke-filled, slice-of-life worlds,” it’s a great moment of a meta-joke. Since isekai anime are pretty much the opposite of slice-of-life anime, it’s extra funny, since they’ve ultimately been shoved into just that kind of world in this series and have to make their way through so many jokes.
1 Mistaking Mare For A Girl
In Overlord, Mare is actually constantly mistaken for a girl since he wears a skirt and generally looks pretty traditionally feminine as well as having a soft, high-pitched voice. When the teams split up to do the test of courage at the beach, and his team members remark on what an angel he is, he tells them, a little disgruntled, that he’s a boy, and everyone reacts with shock and amazement.
It’s a fun reference to the Overlord series; instead of being a more overt plot point that explains the show, the way most of the references have been so far, it’s a small wink to fans who are already familiar with its jokes.